A Different Person

The son of extreme privilege who became a great American poet—winner of every major poetry prize, from the Pulitzer to the Bollingen—looks back on his coming of age as a gay man before Stonewall in a charming, searching memoir that was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, featuring a new introduction by Hilton Als.

“Stands with Merrill’s finest work.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

James Merrill, the son of Charles Merrill, a founder of Merrill Lynch, sailed for Europe in 1950—in part for the immersion in high culture and the art, in part to escape his divorced parents and their prying eyes, as well as the stifling round of their South Hampton-NYC society. Jimmy flings himself on this European adventure, setting up house with a lover in Rome, meeting Alice B. Toklas, and navigating his crucial, sometimes comic sessions with the ex-pat psychoanalyst Dr. Detre, a wonderfully measured presence who helped the young man on the couch strive toward shaping the “different” person he hoped to become.

The sixty-something Merrill who wrote this iconic memoir allowed his young self to take center stage, not hiding his foibles, but entering with his elder voice in italicized paragraphs here and there, to provide revealing commentary that revises his callow judgments. A book about the rocky and tender journey to (gay) adulthood, all the more lasting because it is not narrowly conceived as a book about a poet; it is the tale of a questing young man who seemingly has everything but knows it isn’t much at all without enlightenment, belonging, and self-understanding.